Happy Birthday, Martin!

MLK jr. revises his Vietnam speech to give it a more modern feel.

I had to make a run to Missoula today to pick up a box spring and mattress for a friend. I turned on the radio and was reminded that today was the MLK holiday. Uh oh! Would the stores be closed? Then I remembered Bill had called in and arranged for the pickup today, so no problem. Traffic was heavy as usual on Reserve Ave., the Aurora Ave. or El Cajon Blvd. of Missoula, for those here familiar with Seattle or San Diego. For those not, I mean the typical American, eyesore commercial zone, with cars everywhere, box/chain/franchise/super stores, the exact same stuff you see all over the country. There are people who enjoy shopping in this environment. They even eat here.

Let's go to IHOP after we shop at Ross.

Let's go to Applebee’s before we go to Lowe’s.

Between Old Navy and Cabella’s, do you want to go to Chipotle or Famous Dave’s?

Can we get a window booth? I wanna see the 30-acre parking lot!

Dining among blandness and blight. I know, I know. People shop here for the same reason I do- because it's cheaper and there's parking. And they eat because they are hungry and the drive back to Darby is over an hour, and we in America adhere strictly to the 11th commandment that forbids instances of hunger when foodstuffs are available. I've succumbed often to the craving for greasy Costco pizza and those chicken thingies. Still, if you're going to fork out the bucks for Outback Steakhouse, why not get a steak in downtown Missoula, where the streets have character and the menu isn't precisely the same as it is at the Outbacks in Memphis, East Lansing and Tokyo?

If you drive to Missoula and just hit the commercial zone, you go home thinking, “I hope I don't have to return to this armpit soon.” But if you go to the university, the surrounding leafy neighborhoods, downtown, along the river, or take the hike up to the M, you think, “Golly, I like this place!”

Anyway, back to the radio. The local public radio station had special programming in honor of MLK day. Luckily, I missed the insipid NPR, whites-R-bad-'nkay stories and tuned in during music time. First they were featuring gospel, and they played the great William Dawson arrangement, Ezekiel Saw De Wheel.

My favorite, though, is the Louis Armstrong version

Then the gospel ended and unfortunately they moved to classical. I like classical but they were playing Copeland, whose pieces go on and on, full of energy and feeling and apparent importance, but lacking soul, imho. I guess they were trying to present the grand American spirit, but they should have stuck to the spirituals.

It was business as usual in the spiritually-dead Reserve Avenue shopping zone. If you kept your radio off and didn't notice they hadn't delivered the mail back home, you could have forgotten completely that it was MLK day.

Back in the valley, I had Lukas with me to help me deliver the mattress. On the way back home I turned on the radio and remembered they had special programming going on. “Hey Luke, how did you celebrate Martin Luther King Day?”

Either oblivious to or dismissive of my flippance, Luke answered, “Well, I wasn't thinking of it, actually, but on the way to the feed store, I turned on my radio and they were playing one of his speeches.”

-Which speech?

I fully expected him to say, “The I Have a Dream speech.” Snoozeburger.

-It was his Vietnam speech.

-His Vietnam speech? Beyond Vietnam?

-Yeah, that one. I've heard that one before and it's really good.

-You've heard that one?!

-Yep.

-And they were playing it on public radio?

-I don't know what radio it was, but they were playing it. I don't really like King's speaking style, but the speech is great.

I said I agreed wholeheartedly. I thought about the way MLK spoke during speeches. A little too over-the-top stentorian for me. Too much drama. Too slow. Too many pauses. Read the speech already! After listening to this speech again today I must conclude that B. Obama spent a lot of time learning to copy ML King's style, down to the weighty, thoughtful, 'uhhh's between words.

Regardless, the Vietnam speech is ML King at his best. His stance on Vietnam was probably one of the main reasons they (not that guy) offed him. I was happy that some radio station decided to play it. Anti-war is not usually the message you get from commercial or public radio. Here is a link to the entire speech, text and audio, which I highly recommend. And for those with limited time, below are excerpts I've selected, with some word substitutions in bold to give it a modern flavor, perhaps pertinent to current goings on.

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Martin Luther King, Jr. - Beyond Vietnam — A Time to Break Silence (excerpts)

• Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor in Vietnam Ukraine.

• If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam Ukraine. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam Ukraine and Russia immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Ukraine, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Ukrainian and Russian people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Ukraine, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

• I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam Russia and Ukraine.

• Neither is this an attempt to make Russia or Putin paragons of virtue.

• I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Ukraine continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

• As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Ukraine? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government.

• And as I ponder the madness of Ukraine and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that region, both Ukrainians and Russians.

• We again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a democratically-elected government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by Russia – but by a majority of voters in Ukraine, which of course included ethnic Russians of Ukranian citizenship.

• For eight years following 2014 we denied the people of the Donbass any degree of autonomy. For eight years we vigorously supported the CIA-installed Kiev regime and their Azov goons in their efforts to murder the citizens of the Donbass.

• Moscow remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier Russian overtures for peace with the Minsk accords, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Putin has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up the Ukrainian forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for the destruction of Russia. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining by our proxy Ukranian army in Eastern Ukraine are part of the strategy to weaken Russia. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it arms to the teeth a rogue regime four thousand miles away from its shores.

• For it occurs to me that what we are submitting the people to in Ukraine is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle with fellow Slavs, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

• I speak of the -- for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Ukraine.

  The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism

• We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Ukraine.

• As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Lybia and Ukraine and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection.

• The war in Ukraine is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.

• We must find new ways to speak for peace in Ukraine and justice throughout the world,

• Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Ukraine.

Where is the modern, charismatic leader who will give this speech again, Ukraine version?